BluffMaster!
The Greatest Academic Fraud Of The Century
Hi! This week I bring you the curious life of Diederik Stapel and his topsy-turvy career but before that, I wanted to thank all my readers for the love they have shown to this newsletter over the last three months. We are a 400 strong community now and hope to keep growing! Be sure to share and like the story if you like it. I will keep coming back with more such stories every week :)
Let’s get right into the story now.
Meet Diederik Stapel
Diederik Stapel was the former Dean of the School of Social and Behavioural Science at the Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He was a rockstar in the field of social psychology and behavioural economics. Most of this fame was down to his impeccable research history where he had written hundreds of papers on social psychology.
Personally, he was a charming, charismatic man who often ended up forming a personal friendship with his students. For him, beauty and simplicity were above all else. He did not like things being messy, it should be no surprise then that most of his research papers were very neat studies into human behaviour with a very clear effect size, large sample and well-distributed data.
The problem, of course, was that none of this was real.
He was fabricating data over and over again.
But Why?
Why would someone risk so much for the sake of some research papers? Stapel had been known to be quite a smart cookie since his post-grad days, why then was he risking it all for the sake of some publications?
The answer, as it often is, was ambition.
The publication process for a research paper is not as unbiased or as scientific as we would like to think it is. Think about it, a journal only makes its money by selling copies of its editions. These copies are often very expensive and will only be bought if academicians think they contain something of value. This ‘value’ will only come from positive results or ‘sexy’ results.
You found a positive correlation between damage to the hippocampus and sexual dysfunction? You get published.
You found no significant difference between personality types and their perception of beauty? Eh well, who cares?
Researchers have an incentive to ‘find’ positive results. The more positive results they find, the more papers get published and the more they are respected. Stapels’ ambition was not necessarily a monetary one, it was one of respect.
And this ambition drove Stapel to quite a lot of places. He became the Dean of a School and was the founder of a research centre on behavioural economics. He was invited for talks and sought after by students for doctoral supervision.
The first time he fabricated data, he only tweaked the dataset to get the result he wanted. By the time he was caught, Stapel was fabricating complete experiments, from design to data collection and analysis. And why wouldn’t he? He had gotten away with it for so long.
His most daring piece of fraud was when he fabricated an experiment proving an unconscious racist bias against black people. He claimed he had performed the experiment at a railway station.
He had never even been to that station.
The scope of his lies was huge and it was natural that when his deceit was revealed, Psychology would come under the scanner for letting such practices go on under the radar. What else about the discipline was a lie?
In the hit series, Chernobyl, there is a great line, “Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, the debt is paid.”
Thankfully, the degree of fraud in social sciences is estimated to be quite low compared to the number of researches published each year. Experts claim it could be somewhere between 1-2%, which while not an insignificant number, does not put the validity of the field in doubt. (That is an accusation more fitting with the replication crisis, I wrote about it last week.)
All Truth Claims Its Debt
Once the degree of Stapel’s lies came to the forefront, his position at his university became untenable. He was immediately suspended after an internal inquiry confirmed his fraud.
His papers were put under review and every single one of his publications was looked back at again. To date, there have been 59 retractions. But the most painful cost was not paid by Stapel, it was paid by his students.
Stapel used to insist on collecting the data for his doctoral students because of a ‘wide network of participants’ that he claimed to have readily available. Everyone who completed a PhD or a dissertation under him was put under a scanner as well. When Stapel said he was collecting data, he would actually be faking it at a computer in his house.
All research under him was now tainted, without any fault of the primary researchers.
Shortly before Stapel was exposed, a paper of his, along with another researcher, Roosje Vonk, made the news because it claimed to prove that “Meat brings out the worst in people.” The researchers claimed they had evidence that meat consumption, or being reminded of meat made people more selfish, lonely and disconnected from those around them.
This research was picked up by animal rights groups and vegetarianism promoters as proof as well. Luckily, Stapel was exposed before this study could be published.
But that did not stop Vonk from coming under fire for Stapel’s actions. She was reprimanded for publishing conclusions before a study was peer-reviewed and when she had not verified the data collection and analysis process. At one point, she was close to losing her job but was saved because she had not been personally responsible for faking the data.
This is just one example of the hundreds of lives Stapel affected with his actions.
A New Lie Or A Change?
When the accusations of fraud first came forward, Stapel vehemently denied them.
“Maybe it is my enemies trying to bring me down.” he told a close friend but there was no running from the truth. He had been caught. When he finally admitted it to his wife and his colleagues, it was as if a fog had dissipated from his eyes. Suddenly, he just saw everything very clearly and was consumed with guilt. (That is what he says, we cannot know if we can trust him or not)
He admitted to all his lies in public and apologised. He would claim he had lost his moral compass at the time but that it was back now and he was a new man.
We cannot be so sure about that.
Ever since being exposed, Stapel has tried to make money off of his own fraud by writing a book about it (which was leaked), offering to speak at colleges and universities and trying to be a part of the play based on his own cons. It’s not quite clear whether his actions today are a part of another new scheme or if he has truly turned a corner ethically and morally. Maybe, we will never know.
What made Stapel do all this?
It was simple. It started slow but then kept escalating. He kept getting away with it and he kept wondering what else he could get away with. It didn’t help that he was constantly rewarded for his publications. In a competitive publishing world, every paper he published meant a better chance of promotion.
Stapel’s parents, to this day, insist that what he did was because of a system that did not hold people accountable and encouraged fraud. For them, if it wasn’t their son, it would have been someone else. Stapel, on the other hand, takes responsibility for his actions and says that he must accept what happened and face the consequences that come with it.
Question of the Week
Where do you stand on this?
Do you think Stapel simply took an opportunity that was presented to him by the system or was he a conman who misused the trust put in him by his colleagues and students for personal ambition?
And that is it for this week! Hope all my readers are doing well. We are 400 strong now and it has been such a fulfilling experience. How has it been for you? How can I improve? Let me know your thoughts!
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Until next week,
Arjun
He was caught but there may be so many still doing this fake work as the system of verification is not available.
To answer your question, I think it was a bit of both. Every person wants to leave their legacy behind and in the process, one may get greedy and walk down unethical routes. But the fact that it was fueled by the system was truly no help. The point is, MAYBE at the end of the day one must take responsibility for their actions even in a broken system.